7 Bad Habits That Will Shorten Your Laptop Usage Lifespan

While laptops are not quite so expensive as they used to be, and you can find cheap computer service in Singapore, you still don’t want to be replacing them on a regular basis.

Bad Habits That Shorten The Lifespan of Your Laptop

You can improve the lifespan of your laptop by not doing these bad habits:

1. Letting the Laptop Get Dirty

All computers get dirty unless you are working in a sterile environment. But that doesn’t mean you have to leave them dirty. Dust, bits of food and other dirt can get inside your laptop, generate additional heat and put more stress on the bits inside it. This cuts performance and lifespan.

Solution: Clean it regularly — at least twice a year if not more.

2. Insufficient Ventilation

Although the fans and heat sinks in your laptop will do their job, if they become clogged up or you are working in a stuffy environment, they can’t do it properly.

Solution: Keep your laptop in a cool environment and clean the dirt and dust from your fans regularly.

3. Don’t Ignore Laptop Hard Drive Problems

System errors can cause corruption on your hard drive — and this is normally through system crashes, improper shutdowns and lots of other things. This will damage your system to the point where it may not even start up. Ignoring these issues will lead to the death of your hard drive. Luckily most operating systems have built-in tools to ensure your hard drive stays in tip-top condition.

Solution: Run system scans on a regular basis — every month or so.

4. Not Using the Defrag Tool – Ever!

Over time, the data on your hard drive will get spread out. The files fragment and are saved in different places and this will slow down your hard drive and make it work a lot harder.

Solution: Using the defrag tool regularly will tidy things up and allow your hard drive to run more smoothly, thus reducing the wear and tear.

5. Not Having Power Surge Protection

Even a laptop, running on a battery as it does, is not immune to power surges, especially unexpected or violent power surges. Fluctuations in power and sudden spikes can cause a lot of issues, damaging the power supply or the internal components of the laptop.

Solution: Plugging your laptop into a high-rated surge protector can help to protect it.

6. Not Protecting Against Laptop Power Loss

This follows on from the last point. Sudden power losses can also cause trouble, especially if the battery on your laptop is low or requires replacing. Data can be lost; files or drives can become corrupted.

Solution: For this, you need a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply). These maintain power to the laptop for enough time for you to close it down correctly.

7. Not Having the Right Anti-Virus Protection 

Viruses and malware can do a lot of damage to your laptop file system and the cost of data recovery and/or computer repair can be big.

Solution: Ensure that you have good anti-virus software on your laptop, run complete scans regularly and check for malware on a regular basis too.